Thursday, November 20, 2008

Winter Ale, Port Townsend Brewing Company, Port Townsend Washington

Our next offering comes from Port Townsend Brewing Company and will be the first of their brews that I have sampled. Let's dig in....

It pours a dark brown.

The smell is a fresh malty sweetness. It has a hoppy freshness that has a strange strawberry-esque aroma.

The taste is malty with a lively bitterness on the tongue. There is a unique yeast flavor at play as well, but very subtle. It has a medium/full body and is very smooth. The strawberry aroma is there in a very mild way. It's less strawberry, more of a general fruit leatherness to it. It's very slight and hard to pin down. For the most part, the beer is fairly well-balanced.

The aftertaste is mild malt, with the bitterness dissipating fairly quickly.

From their website:

Malts: Pale and Crystalwith roasted barley and Belgian aromatic malts

7.4%

Availability has been fairly limited for me. I found mine in Bellingham, WA at a grocery store. I haven't seen any around Portland yet...